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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Apple closes its $400M Shazam acquisition and says the music recognition app will soon become ad free [techcrunch.com]

Last year, [TechCrunch] broke the news [techcrunch.com] that Apple was buying the music recognition startup and app Shazam for about $400 million, and nearly one year later, the deal has finally closed. Today, Apple announced [apple.com] that it has completed the acquisition, and that it would soon be making the service ad free to use for everyone, removing the app's ad-supported free tier.

[...] It's not clear how Apple longer term will integrate Shazam's core product into its service — a pretty clever piece of technology that can identify a song by hearing a fragment of it. The two main directions appear to be to let it continue to remain a standalone app longer term, or to subsume part or all of it into a bigger Apple Music offering. (The two are not mutually exclusive.)

At $400 million — a figure confirmed to us by several sources when we were first reporting on the deal — Shazam is one of Apple's biggest acquisitions both in music and overall, and it underscores the amount of investment that the iPhone maker is willing to put into expanding its role as a force not just in hardware, but in the services that run on that hardware.

Also at The Verge [theverge.com].

Previously: Apple Buys Music Recognition Service Shazam for $400 Million [soylentnews.org]

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